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In November I stopped cooking meat at home. I had been wanting to reduce our meat consumption for a while, but it just seemed so hard to change all of my regular recipes for new vegetarian ones. It turned out that it wasn't as hard as I had feared to kick the meat habit.
I started with a one-month commitment, figuring we could go without until the Thanksgiving turkey. I don't keep secrets from my husband, but I made an exception and didn't tell him we about eating meat for the first week. I wanted to make sure this commitment was going to stick, and I figured once I got a few tasty meatless meals in him he would not protest.
It turns out I had nothing to fear. I had to step out of my recipe comfort zone (some may refer to as a rut) and find new ones, but I discovered many easy, delicious, and satisfying meals that my husband and three-year old both love. I even made lasagna for my in-laws with vegetarian sausage that they raved about. Now we've been doing this for 6 months and it has just become our routine.
There is a wonderful effort called the PB&J Campaign, a campaign to reduce the amount of animal products people eat by encouraging people to eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich instead of meat and dairy. Really, any plant-based meal will do, but a PB&J is something pretty familiar to even the biggest meat-lovers, and tasty too. It is a fun way to think about reducing your footprint, but the impact is quite significant. According to their website:
-Each time you have a plant-based meal like a PB&J sandwich you reduce your carbon dioxide emissions over an animal-based meal by 2.5 pounds for lunch.
-If you have a PB&J instead of red meat, you reduce your carbon footprint by 3.5 pounds.
-You also save a whopping 133 gallons of water at lunch, and 24 square feet of land from deforestation and pollution.
Holy cow!
The numbers don't work out perfectly, as my family does eat dairy and eggs, but on average my family is saving:
-22.5 pounds of carbon each day, 540 pounds each month, and about 7000 pounds per year;
-7128 gallons of water per week, or 373,000 per year; and
-1296 square feet of land each week.
That's nothing to shake a stick at.
I'm thoroughly convinced that anybody can do this. You get to make rules that work for your family, whether you want to remove meat at one meal per week or avoid all animal products each July. In our family, we don't eat meat at home, but we eat whatever we want at restaurants (we eat out about once a week). We also occasionally cook meat for visitors and on special occasions, like that Thanksgiving turkey. We also happen to really like peanut butter and jelly.
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